


Five Times Jake Considered Fatherhood

by nymphadoracrashedthetardis



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Baby Fic, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-10-27 21:07:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10816773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nymphadoracrashedthetardis/pseuds/nymphadoracrashedthetardis
Summary: And one time he experienced it.





	Five Times Jake Considered Fatherhood

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, I can't believe I wrote a Five-Times fic in 2017. Hashtag vintage and all that.
> 
> Reviews are greatly appreciated, always cried over, and never forgotten.

ONE- AGE FOUR

 

Jake’s aunt and uncle’s house was quieter than normal when he arrived one Saturday afternoon. Normally - the  _ normally  _ he could remember in his young life - the windows would be open to let in the faint sounds of traffic, and the radio would be on loud enough to hum to but quiet enough to talk over, and no one would really care if his footfalls echoed through the house as he ran around in circles, playing games.

 

This time, though. This time everyone was speaking softly, and his mom’s hand was resting firmly on his shoulder in the way it did when she wanted him to remain calm. The radio was off, and even the sunlight was low, as if it, too, needed to remind everyone to be quiet.

 

“We’re going to visit your new baby cousin today. His name’s Matthew,” Mom told him as she buckled him into his blue raincoat. Jake helped her with the last few buckles- he was starting kindergarten soon, after all, and he needed to know how to do it himself.

 

“Okay,” Jake said in the matter-of-fact way only a four year old could muster. “Does Matthew like lions?” Lions had been his favourite for the past two weeks now, and it was very important to him that his cousin liked them, too.

 

Mom chuckled and slipped his mittens on. “No, Matthew’s just a baby, remember? All he likes to do is eat and sleep.”

 

“I like to eat and sleep, too, so we can still be friends.”

 

Mom didn’t disagree with him there.

 

Back at his aunt and uncle’s house, Jake stood quietly as they were greeted into the small townhouse. He bobbed on his stockinged feet on the rough red carpet and eyed the narrow hallway leading into the living room. He wanted to run down it and jump onto the ottoman placed right at the very end of it, but he refrained himself, because Mom told him not to and Jake hadn’t yet learned to disobey his mom.

 

He tugged on his aunt’s sleeve. “Where’s the baby?” he asked.

 

His aunt crouched down next to him. “He’s upstairs sleeping right now,” she said. “How are you, Jake? Good?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Will you give your aunt a hug?”

 

Jake nodded and threw himself into his aunt’s arms. He liked giving hugs very much. He was pretty good at them.

 

The baby -  Matthew - was sleeping up the tall stairwell in Jake’s aunt and uncle’s bedroom, where Jake sometimes watched TV while the adults talked downstairs. There was no TV there now, and the entire room was rearranged accommodate the baby furniture. Jake tiptoed exaggeratingly behind his mom towards the bassinet in the corner.

 

“Oh, he’s beautiful,” Mom whispered.

 

Jake got as close to the bassinet as he could and stood on his toes so he could see inside. The baby was pink with dark hair, and was sleeping, wrapped in a blanket like a burrito. Jake thought it looked pretty comfortable. He reached out with his right hand to touch it. Mom stopped him.

 

“Don’t disturb him, Jacob.”

 

“What does it  _ do _ , though.”

 

“I told you,  _ he _ eats and sleeps, and later he’ll learn how to do other stuff.”

 

“Can I teach him about lions now?”

 

“Maybe another time.” She took Jake’s hand and led him quietly back down the stairs.

 

Later, Jake was distracted with a plate of cookies on the couch - chocolate, his favourite - when his uncle slid a big, glossy book over to him. On the cover was a photo of an infant wearing only a diaper.

 

“Though you might want to learn more about babies,” he said. Jake nodded. He only knew how to read a few simple words, and he wasn’t super excited about learning to read, anyway, but he liked looking at pictures, and this book had a whole lot of them. He munched happily on his cookies while flipping through the pages, pointing out his favourite photos.

 

Jake was obsessed with babies for the next three and a half weeks. He decided he wanted four of them before moving on to butterflies in the early summer.

 

* * *

 

TWO- AGE ELEVEN

 

The sticky sweet smell of early summer was in the air the day Jake spent two and a half hours sitting on the curb outside his house.

 

He was eleven now, and it was to be the first summer Jake was allowed to go further than the park a five minute bike ride away by himself. He and Gina had grand plans that summer - namely, to visit the park a  _ fifteen _ minute bike ride away. It had a pond and Jake had his heart set on learning to catch frogs.

 

(Neither of them get any better by the time summer is over, but they do try.)

 

That afternoon, however, the thought of Gina and his other friends was pushed aside. Jake’s  _ dad _ was taking him to the arcade, and he hadn’t seen him since  _ the holidays _ . Jake was jumpy from the waiting, and through the haze and excitement Jake could  _ almost  _ forgive him for missing his birthday.

 

(Almost.)

 

Half an hour before dad was scheduled to pick him up, Jake was sitting on the front stoop with his backpack packed and sunscreen freshly smeared on his nose.

 

(He could be early, you never knew.)

 

It was nearly noon, and the sun warmed him. Jake sat up straight, then he decided that was too prim and slouched instead. Then he sat up again.

 

“Sit in the shade, please, Jake,” Mom called out from an open window. Jake grumbled but scooted to the right until the sun was no longer in his eyes. Nothing could get him down.

 

His  _ dad _ was coming to visit.

 

~~

 

At noon, every car to pass by his street caused Jake’s head to whip around. None of them slowed down, but he strained his eyes to see if the driver was dad and he had just forgotten where Jake lived.

 

(Where Roger Peralta had himself lived at one point, but that was beside the point.)

 

He tapped his foot happily against the pavement and kept his eye out.

 

  
~~

 

One o’clock. One hour after dad was supposed to pick Jake up and an hour and a half after Jake went outside to wait for him. He was used to the hot pavement now, and his face was warmed from the sun. Mom had already come outside once to give him a juice box.

 

“Maybe it’s time to come inside now, hun,” she said softly to him.

 

“No, ‘cause then I’ll have to come all the way outside again when he does get here,” Jake whined.

 

Karen ruffled his hair, almost mindlessly, and sighed. “Alright, then.”

 

Jake sipped on his juice box and went to sit on the lawn, for a change of scenery.

 

~~

 

By one thirty, there was a patch of weedless grass on the lawn. Jake had pulled up the little white flowers that grew and tried to braid them together the way his friends sometimes did at recess. The stems were too short and his fingers too clumsy, so he scrunched them into a ball and threw it onto the curb. There was a sinking feeling in his stomach.

  
  


It was almost two when Mom came outside again. She waved a bottle of sunscreen in the air.

 

“Time to reapply, bud.” Jake grumbled but held out his palms. Mom squeezed out a dollop of sunscreen onto his hands and he smeared it across his face.

 

“Cover your nose better - there you go,” she said. She replaced the cap with a  _ snap _ . “You know, he probably had a work emergency come up.”

 

“Yeah, he’s probably gonna be a bit late.”

 

Mom was quiet for a moment. “How about I wait with you?” she finally said.

 

“Okay.”

 

Mom sat cross-legged next to him on the grass. “You know, I have tomorrow off again. How about we go and get some ice cream or something?”

 

“Yeah, okay.”

 

They sat on the lawn, picking at blades of grass until it was much past two and Jake’s sunscreen had all but sunk in. Finally,  _ finally _ , Jake got up to go inside.

 

“Maybe we should go in in case he calls,” he said. Mom said nothing. They trudged up the steps and into the house, and Jake had the inkling of the feeling that he knew what a good father didn’t look like.

 

* * *

 

THREE- AGE TWENTY THREE

 

Jake was never the patient kind, sure. He tapped in feet in lines and groaned like a child at long delays, and any wait of more than fifteen seconds caused a dead weight of boredom to settle in his chest.

 

The four minutes spent with his girlfriend Olivia waiting for a pregnancy test to develop felt like suffocation. 

 

“I can’t have a child,” Olivia groaned. They were sitting side by side on her bed, shoulders just barely grazing each other. Jake could only swallow and started straight ahead. 

 

_ His apartment was bigger, so they should probably live there, and there was that sunny spot they could put a crib, and oh god, babies can’t shower, he’s gonna have to clean out the mail tub- _

 

The longer he didn’t speak, the more Olivia tensed up.

 

“How am I going to finish my master’s if I have a baby to look after? Oh god, I’m gonna have to take more time off.” She was panicking now; her breath was coming up short and her voice reached a high decibel that it didn’t usually. Olivia was normally the calmer one of the two of them. Jake stroked her leg with his thumb.

 

“If- if it is positive, it won’t just be you, you know? I’ll be there doing half the work.”

 

“I know. Thank you.”

 

Jake cocked his head to glance at Olivia’s watch, counting down the minutes. Two minutes, forty four seconds left to go.

 

“Would you- keep the baby, then? If it’s positive?”  _ He just became a cop what if he gets shot he’s gonna have to get a desk job promotion asap- _

 

“I don’t- I don’t know,” she breathed. There was a siren wailing somewhere in the distance, and it ate up her voice. Jake’s thumb kept moving over Olivia’s thigh in small circles, but he focused on his breathing more, letting it fall in time to the traffic outside.

 

_ They’ll both need to work who will babysit they can’t always ask their parents- _

 

A horn beeped in the distance and threw Jake’s breathin off. He tried again.

 

_ They’ll need to buy clothes and diapers, and oh god, he’ll need a new camera because, duh, cute baby, but they’re expensive and he’s always broke- _

 

Olivia’s digital watch beeped and they both startled. She hit a button to turn it off.

 

“Ready?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

She flipped over the test, turned upside down for their respective sanities. They both stared at it for a moment. 

 

“What does that mean?”

 

“Negative,” she breathed. 

 

“Oh, thank god.” Relief bubbled in his chest, softly but gaining intensity, and feeling he didn’t know he had lost returned to his limbs. Olivia tossed the test in the trash and Jake watched it tumble with a  _ clack _ .

 

_ Another time. _

 

* * *

 

FOUR- AGE THIRTY FOUR

 

Jake was in Florida for six months, give or take (he didn’t like to think in specifics because it was much, much too hard to do). He was there for six months, and in those six months, he was stranded without job nor family to keep him grounded.

 

Correction- there was Holt, part of his work family, staunchly insisting on not being Raymond Holt the entire time. And there was that photo of Amy he hung up and sometimes talked to. And there was that job he took towards the end, maybe not quite his dream job, but perhaps the job that gave him his life back.

 

But Holt was not Holt and Amy couldn’t respond to him and his job only increased the frequency of the pangs he got whenever he was reminded of home. 

 

It was a long, dull summer.

 

Jake thought about Amy. A lot. He thought about all parts of home, to be clear - his bed, his street, his mom, even his cheap car - but thoughts of Amy popped up often and were difficult to taper down.

 

The worst occurred out of the blue one afternoon at work. It was many months into his time at Florida, and Jake was becoming adept at squashing his mood swings down, or, at least, more adept at hiding them. 

 

The Fun Zone was packed with children in party hats that afternoon, the second birthday party of the day, and Jake was already sick of them.

 

(He was a little jealous of those kids though, to be honest.)

 

It was after he stopped the fourth child from driving their battery-operated car inside the arcade that he saw  _ the kid.  _ Three or four years old, curly hair, intelligent eyes, tan skin. If he squinted, that kid could’ve been his and Amy’s.

 

Jake felt a lump in his throat. He had spent a lot of time daydreaming whilst in Florida, and while some daydreams were just of the present - returning home, to work - some were of future scenarios he would never dare voice aloud. 

 

And this kid came awfully close to the image he had in his daydreams. The child ran around his older siblings and their friends, stubby legs keeping him from catching up. Jake stuffed his hands in his pockets to stop himself from taking the kid and throwing him on his back, piggyback style, to give him the advantage over the others.

 

Florida would be over eventually, Jake knew that, but some painful truths remained. Even if Figgis was caught that very day and New York and Jake Peralta were safe to return to, Jake and Amy were still six months behind where they were supposed to be. Another six months to wait for their little Amy-Jake hybrid. It would take them six months to catch up to where they should have been, and then they’d have  _ that _ six months to catch up on, and  _ oh god _ , would they spend the rest of their lives chasing the time they lost?

 

Jake’s eyes burned, whether from the Florida sun or from something else, and he turned his back on the kid. He didn’t want to see him hit a pinata with his clumsy enthusiastic hands, didn’t want to see his parents dote on him and his siblings grumble. He traced the lining of his cargo short pockets and made his rounds inside, not really seeing anything.

 

It would be the last time in Florida Jake would allow himself to think like that.

 

* * *

 

 

FIVE- AGE THIRTY FIVE

 

Jake and Amy were calm when they offered to babysit Terry’s kids. There were composed when he handed them his car keys and told them when and where to pick them up. They were still cool as clams when Terry gave them last minute instructions on bedtime and dinner.

 

The moment their shift ended, the elevator doors closed, and they were out of everyone’s lines of sight, however, Amy turned to Jake so quickly he thought her ponytail surely must’ve given her whiplash.

 

“You’ve babysat Terry’s kids before, right?”

 

Jake rocked back and forth on his feet. “Nope,” he said. “But I figured it wouldn’t be hard. Ava won’t be there, so it’s just two-on-two, instead of three-on-two.”

 

“Jake, you know I suck at kids.”

 

“Babe, you don’t  _ suck at kids. _ Young people just tend to not like you.” Amy glared at him. “Okay, fine, but it’ll still be okay. We’ll play some games, feed them dinner, and if a problem comes up, you can use your Seven Point Plan for Conflict Resolution on them.”

 

“Oh, I’ve been wanting to try that out,” Amy mused.

 

“And I’ve been excited to see it in action.”

 

Amy glanced at her watch. “Alright, alright,” she said, mainly to herself. “We have just over an hour before we have to pick them up. That gives us time to think of a plan.” They were in the parking garage now, and Amy unlocked Terry’s minivan with a  _ beep. _ “I’ll drive, you navigate. Do you have any data left?”

 

“You know I don’t,” Jake said, already reaching into Amy’s pocket for her phone. He climbed into the passenger’s side and threw his bag at his feet, sinking into his seat. There were no crumbs to be seen and the whole car smelled faintly of pine.

 

Wow, so this must what having a nice, clean car was like.

 

“Alright, you put in the addresses, and we’ll need to think of some activities for the kids, something that won’t get them too riled up, and oh! Maybe we can bring them some treats to warm them up to us! Kids like candy, right?”

 

“Two steps ahead of you,” Jake said, waving Amy’s phone in the air. Amy glanced away from the road for a moment to see him do a little victory dance in his seat. “There’s a strip mall with a drug store a few blocks away from the school. Oh, and make a right here.”

 

“Nice! Okay, okay.”

 

Amy’s fingers drummed on the wheel as they drove. The two of them already had a spotty record amongst their co workers, between Jake’s initial hostility towards Nikolaj and their failed attempt at housesitting for Holt the year before, and Jake knew Amy was determined to change their reputation.

 

(Hell, he was, too.)

 

Amy parked the car neatly towards the back of the lot, away from the congregation of cars closer to the stores. Terry would kill them if they got his precious minivan scratched.

 

“Okay, gameplan,” Amy said as they walked through the drugstore’s sliding doors. “We need healthy snacks, and unhealthy snacks, and something to entertain them with -”

 

Jake pointed ahead of them. “There’ a movie rack.”

 

“Yes! Perfect. You go pick one out - keep it kid friendly -”

 

“Obviously.”

 

“And I’ll be back with the food,” Amy finished. 

 

“Make sure that’s kid friendly, too!”

 

Amy’s head was shaking as she walked away from him. Jake chuckled to himself as he flipped through the meagre DVD display. Amy would definitely be the kind of mom that would insist on all healthy eating all the time, despite the fact that she couldn’t make a non-frozen meal to save her life.

 

Amy returned just as Jake picked out their movie - which in itself didn’t take long, since it was the only animated film on the rack that Jake was positive was intended for children.

 

“ _ Planes _ ?” Amy asked as she walked up to him. She was juggling a frozen cake and a bag of baby carrots.

 

“There’s not much of a selection here,” he mumbled. “But you did well, I see.”

 

“Yeah, kids are so easy to buy for. I just chose the thing with the highest sugar content.”

 

“We’re gonna make the best parents.”

 

“I know, right?” They stood in the short line at the register. “And with our kids, we can start from the beginning, so it’ll be even easier to make them like us.”

 

“Charles is gonna be so happy to hear all about this.”

 

“ _ No _ , Jake, you’re not telling him we’ll be plying our kids with frozen food.”

 

* * *

 

+1- AGE THIRTY SIX

 

Jake and Amy’s apartment was quiet, still. It was mid-afternoon and half of their drapes were firmly shut. There was no music or TV playing in the background. Jake couldn’t remember when he last changed his outfit of sweatpants and old NYPD shirt.

 

It didn’t matter. Their  _ daughter _ was finally here.

 

In the past day, there was probably a two hour span where Jake and Amy were napping together that neither of them had an eye out on little Hannah. Any time outside of that, however, one of them always seemed to be watching her.

 

After finishing up a quick lunch of microwaved hotdogs, Jake found Amy sitting on the edge of their bed, watching Hannah sleep silently in her little bassinet.

 

“Hey, I thought you were gonna sleep after feeding her.”

 

“I know, but then  _ she  _ fell asleep, and her little nose started twitching, and - oh, she’s doing it again.”

 

“Here, scootch over.” Amy moved a few inches to the right and Jake sat beside her, sitting on the very edge so he could get a good view of their daughter.

 

“We’re gonna have a hard time of this parenting thing if we never get any sleep.”

 

“We can sleep when she’s no longer so cute. In like, eight years.”

 

“Sounds good.”

 

They both  _ aww _ ’ed quietly when Hannah’s hands curled and uncurled in her sleep.

 

“Your parents will be here tomorrow, right?” Jake muttered to Amy. 

 

Amy nodded. “Yeah, they were so upset they had to miss the first few days of their first granddaughter’s life. But don’t worry, they have their hotel booked and everything.”

 

“We are in no shape to entertain.”

 

“No, we are not,” Amy agreed.

 

Jake straightened up slightly. “Aw, it won’t be long before  _ Hannah  _ will be putting  _ us  _ up in hotel rooms.”

 

“She wouldn’t dare,” Amy said affectionately. Hannah’s little foot kicked in the air. Jake rested his head on Amy’s shoulder. The two of them watched their daughter sleep.


End file.
